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Wednesday, April 06, 2005

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

Thomas Friedman, the NY Times Foreign Affairs Columnist and 3 times Pulitzer Prize winner whose column appears in 700 newspapers around the world, tells the story of seeing a poster titled, “I Told You So” hanging in the window of a map shop in Washington DC ten years ago. He was strongly taken to the poster, which he purchased, and it has been hanging in his office for the last 10 years.Jump ahead to 14 months ago, we find Friedman in India’s own silicone valley, Bangalore, working on a documentary for The Discovery Channel on outsourcing and globalization. In the process of taking over 80 hours of interviews for the coming special, Friedman was struck by a statement made by the CEO of India’s IBM equivalent that “The international playing field has been leveled.”This new book “The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century”, developed from this coming documentary along with that CEO’s observation, and when time came to choose a cover for the book, this poster came into Friedman’s mind, was shown to the publishers and then chosen as a perfect cover.